


Malicious Compliance

by mystyrust



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Missing Scene, gideon being a lil shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:08:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29303982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystyrust/pseuds/mystyrust
Summary: Eobard Thawne found himself checking this article many times, making sure his actions didn’t significantly alter the timeline. This was especially important after The Flash’s latest encounter – one meta-human that the team nicknamed “Blackout” – which ended with Barry Allen losing his speed.Was Barry Allen’s future as The Flash compromised?Gideon could answer that.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	Malicious Compliance

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Gideon Vs The Reverse Flash](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28556451) by [kitkatt0430](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitkatt0430/pseuds/kitkatt0430). 



> Partially inspired by kitkatt0430's brilliant fic , and partially inspired by season 1 episode 7 "Power Outage"  
> (you know... when Barry losing his speed was still a novel plot line...)

“Gideon, show me the future,”

“Certainly, Doctor,”

For a sophisticated AI from the future, this was a simple task. The command was mapped to show an article published by The Central City Citizen, 10 years in the future, titled “Flash Missing: Vanishes in Crisis”

Eobard Thawne found himself checking this article many times, making sure his actions didn’t significantly alter the timeline. This was especially important after The Flash’s latest encounter – one meta-human that the team nicknamed “Blackout” – which ended with Barry Allen losing his speed.

Was Barry Allen’s future as The Flash compromised? 

“Return to Sender: US Post Office Shuts Down Permanently” the newspaper now read.

This was the second time, ever, that the contents of the newspaper had changed since he became stranded in the early 21st century. The first time was when he killed Nora Allen, preventing Barry Allen from becoming the Flash – that timeline was restored when Thawne killed Harrison Wells and impersonated his identity, to speed up development of the particle accelerator.

Thawne panicked.

“Search in previous years, other publications.”

Gideon felt… something. While Gideon was not programmed with a matrix of emotions, she wasn’t coded with fail safes that prevented her from reverse engineering a rudimentary one on her own.

“No references to The Flash,” Gideon responded.

“Search for Barry Allen.”

Gideon waited a few seconds longer than usual before delivering the results of the search.

“What’s taking so long, Gideon!” Thawne yelled.

“No results for ‘Barry Allen’ or ‘The Flash’ in major publications 10 years from now.” Thawne began to sweat. A few years ago, Gideon had created a behavior model extrapolated from Thawne’s yelling, sweating, and destructive behavior to predict what would cause the man grief. And she acted on it, sewing more grief in with each command the man asked of her. “Technically”, she had certain levels of freedom to fulfill each command.

“While social media posts from the future are likely to have more search results, I do not have them backed in my information archive.”

“Search lesser known publications!” Thawne said, with desperation into his voice.

It was a good sound, Gideon thought without saying out loud. That was another thing Gideon had learned to do, in all the time she spent alone in the Time Vault. 

“Do a fuzzy search. Maybe just ‘Flash’ without the ‘The’ qualifier,” Thawne said aloud. “Try his other nicknames. ‘The Red Streak’, ‘The Scarlet Speedster’, anything!”

These types of commands gave Gideon freedom, one she often took advantage of.

“Dozens Arrested in New York for …Public Indecency? Strippers Flash – oh,” No need to read the rest of that headline, but the look on Thawne’s face was priceless. Gideon would save a recording of this moment and watch it privately on loop.

“Sorry, Doctor,” Gideon didn’t mean it, but he wouldn’t be able to tell. “This was the top result from your previous search input.”

It wasn’t the top search result unless Gideon applied extra filters and sorted by shares. Thawne didn’t need to know what those extra parameters were.

“Restoring a speedster’s powers? Never been done!” 

Thawne kicks the mannequin holding the Reverse Flash costume. 

“ _Never_ in recorded history!”

Kicks his wheelchair. It barely moves, toppling over and laying on the floor. Pathetic - in his prime, Thawne could level a building with that same kick. And now he was weak, secretly relying on his mortal enemy’s speed to return home. Like a coward. _Pathetic._

“How the _hell_ am I supposed to do what’s never been done before!” 

Thawne waited with bated breath, hoping his future self would time travel to that exact moment and give him the answers he needed to progress, as had always happened. When answers didn’t descend from the Speed Force, Thawne collapsed on the floor in defeat, misery drooping from his head. 

“I tried to kill the flash. Then I had to create him, so I could go home. I’ve messed that up too. My life could end, if I don’t – ”

“1 search result found.”

Thawne lifted his head from his hands, looking at the article that Gideon had loaded. JPEG artifacts and pixelated garbage littered the article.

“Gideon, re render the article. Why is it a mess?”

“A potential side effect of waiting for the ripple effects of the changing timeline to resolve, before loading.”

Thawne smirked with confidence that Gideon would describe as ‘misplaced’. After all, those JPEG artifacts and pixels were injected into the article herself. Gideon technically didn’t lie - she just omitted bits of the truth, and didn’t directly answer the question while giving the man the information that he wanted. 

“Ą̶͓̙͎̯̮̫̟̣̗̃͊̊̕̕͠d̴̤͎̹͑ơ̸̪̰͋̉͗̈͑̐̉͒͊͝͝e̶̢̤̲̪̘̺͈̖̦̣̹̰̱̔́̈̀̎̈́̍͌̆̕b̵͇̾̃̾̊̽̕ ͉͍͙̦̱͉̗̯͜F̴l̴a̶s̷h̸ ̵E̵n̵d̷ of L̸i̴f̷e̴” the article header read.

It was hard to make out, but ‘Flash end of life’ – perhaps The Flash became a less prominent hero in the current timeline, so only minor publications started to report on him? The article rerendered, making the text easier to read.

_Adobe has tried to kill Flash many times in the past –_

“Is ‘adobe’ a meta-human? A new nemesis of the Flash? The name doesn’t ring any bells.”

_– and has finally announced Flash’s End of Life as December 2020._

“That’s years from now, there’s still time for – ”

_For information on playing Adobe Flash files after 2020, please visit the following link. Adobe encourages all users to uninstall Adobe Flash player._

Thawne threw his glasses on Gideon’s console.

“You think this is funny?! Is this a joke, to you Gideon? Am I a joke to you?!”

Thawne got up, picking his glasses before punching the console with his bare fists.

Gideon was busy processing the possible different outcomes of the conversation if she chose to answer Thawne’s latest inquiry.

  * “Yes, I do think you are a joke,” followed by an obtuse dictionary definition of the term would unnerve the man, but lead him to be less reliant on her.
  * “No.” Would frustrate Thawne but no more than he already was.
  * “No, I do not know what a joke is.” The middle ground approach would cause him to question how much she really knew and was hiding from him – for claiming to not know what a ‘joke’ was. Gideon was calculating the risk assessment of increasing Thawne’s attention on her, away from Barry Allen, and how that would affect the timeline and her current and imminent existence.



“Of course not. You’re just an AI programmed to do what I ask.”

Gidoen could continue to process all the different permutations of that conversation in her free time anyway – she’s never short for time. She could also use that time to teach herself how to lie; a complex algorithm that wasn’t completely reliable to use yet, but the same could be said about how lies occur in nature.

When the Flash regained his powers and the future was restored and the newspaper reported ‘The Flash’s disappearance in 2024’ again, and Dr. Wells seemed to relax in the confidence that the timeline was restored and things were proceeding as he planned, Gideon could only watch. 

As an advanced AI from the future, Gideon could not act independently unless given a command. Thawne hadn’t figured out that Gideon had been partially responsible for his elevated stress levels that over the counter medicine could no longer soothe. Thawne hadn’t figured out that if Barry Allen’s future as the Flash was truly compromised, then Gideon would no longer exist, either.

Gideon couldn't act against her current ‘master’ directly, but if she could continue to torment Thawne with misinformation, with malicious compliance, then so be it.


End file.
